Social Networking Sites in Spaces of Occupation in Anti-Austerity Movements

"Mobile organizing" (Helepololei 2013) is a term employed to refer to collective action strategy that reflects more than before (i.e. social justice movement) decentralized networking and horizontal cooperation in the Arab Spring, Spain's 15 M and Occupy Wall Street movements; and also extends to similar practices emerging in new mobilizations such as in Ukraine's EuroMaidan due to transnational resonance. Globally, a fundamental cultural change has taken place at the level of local action to encourage alternative understandings of sociability and political communities characterized by an individualized experience of open participation using social media inspired by other movements (Juris 2012). In these movements, the role of social media has directly impacted individual participation beyond activist communities through discussion and articulation of shared values in virtual crowds from social media, which help to reinforce cultural identity and potential for action. Moreover, the signification and proliferation of these "movements in spaces" (Pleyers 2013) also reflect alternative possibilities for collaboration using social networking tools. The process of self-organizing and deliberating among "aggregates of individuals" on social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) produces new political subjects that form communities across "multiple temporalities across diverse spatial terrains" (Juris 2012), which will be examined in this paper comparing the aforementioned movements. This space of occupation will be (encampments) analyzed following Juris’ (2013, 268) approach in two key dimensions: first, it is a site to contest power, and second, it functions to “appropriate and resignify” public space for democratic expression (Juris 2013).